Good Kickoff Meetings

If you had a chance to hear my talk, Your Meetings Suck and It’s Your Fault, at SXSW – thank you so much for coming! I hope you found it to be equal parts informed, practical, and fun. If you’d like to read any of the books or obtain some of the resources I mentioned [...]

Rome wasn’t built in a day, but at it only took a day for someone to have the idea that it needed to built. Shoot for a depth of problem solving that’s appropriate for the beginning of a process.

Don’t reinvent the wheel: adapt great approaches from other disciplines to the problems you might be facing.

Any meeting has to have good flow. Get the flow happening by considering the continuity of the kickoff experience you are designing.

Facilitate a discussion of your portfolio around your values related to a particular project phase, such as visual design or information architecture.

Gather framing information for visual design phase by get a sense of what a group responds to aesthetically.

Break the design aesthetic of websites down into individual user interface elements, and then assess a group’s reaction to variations in those elements.

Play a great card game that will help get everybody to speed on some basic concepts related to designing social experiences on the web.

Get everyone building paper prototypes with Todd Zaki Warfel’s Design Studio approach, adapted for use in kickoff meetings.

Use this fast and simple technique to explore and develop agreement around organizational priorities.

A variation on the poker game “Pass the Trash,” this technique will assess the priorities of a large organization as well as the amount of variance between two sub groups.

Break a kickoff meeting into multiple meetings. Here’s why.

Conduct your stakeholder interviews before ever having a kickoff meeting.